A-Z

An important twentieth-century architect, Edwin A. Keeble was born in Monteagle Assembly, the fourth of six children of John Bell and Emmie Frazer Keeble. His father was a Nashville attorney and later the dean of the Vanderbilt University Law School.…

Marshall Keeble, born in Rutherford County in 1878, became the best-known African American leader in the Churches of Christ of the twentieth century. In May 2000 The Christian Chronicle named Keeble as its person for the decade 1940 to 1950…

This Nashville barber, businessman, and politician became the first African American elected to the Tennessee General Assembly. Keeble was born circa 1832 in Rutherford County to slave parents, Sampson W. and Nancy Keeble. From the age of nineteen until 1863…

U.S. Congressman and Senator Estes Kefauver was the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1956. Kefauver was born in Madisonville and received his education at the University of Tennessee (1924) and Yale Law School (1927). He practiced law in Chattanooga (1927-39) and…

This lawsuit filed by several African American families in 1955 to desegregate the Nashville public schools dramatically altered education patterns, and its various remedies continue to generate debate. The longest-running case in Tennessee history (the federal court in Nashville still…

Catherine Talty Kenny, suffragist and political activist, was born in Chattanooga in 1874. She married John M. Kenny of Atlanta in 1899 and moved to Nashville, where her husband became president of the Nashville Coca-Cola Bottling Company. Catherine Kenny became…

William Key, nineteenth-century veterinarian and horse trainer, was born a slave in Winchester and took the name of his owner, William Key, a Shelbyville planter and entrepreneur. As a child he demonstrated a remarkable talent for working with horses and…

New South advocate and first Tennessee Commissioner of Agriculture, Joseph B. Killebrew was born May 29, 1831, in Montgomery County, the son of Bryan Whitfield and Elizabeth Smith Ligon Killebrew. In 1835 Bryan Killebrew bought a farm in adjoining Stewart…

The Holston Presbytery founded King College in 1867 in Bristol and named the school for James King, an eighteenth-century settler in the region. Both the acreage and physical plant of the college have more than doubled in 130 years. The…

Internationally acclaimed spokesman of the Civil Rights movement Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. King was in Memphis in an attempt to raise awareness of and support for a strike…

Kingsport was the first economically diversified, professionally planned, and privately financed city in twentieth-century America. Neither an Appalachian hamlet nor a company town, Kingsport developed as a self-proclaimed "All-American City." Affected by mergers, buyouts, and shifting economic trends, contemporary Kingsport…

Kingsport Press was a powerful Tennessee presence in the publishing world for fifty years. The press was initially established in 1922 by Blair and Company, the New York bankers who financed the Clinchfield Railway and the Kingsport town site, with…

An important early twentieth-century sculptor, Belle Kinney graced Nashville with works at the War Memorial Building, the State Capitol, and the Parthenon. Born in Nashville in 1890, one of four children of Captain D. C. and Elizabeth Morrison Kinney, she…

Founded in 1869 by a group of Philadelphia tailors, the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor grew slowly as a secret organization under the leadership of Uriah Stephens. In 1879, when Terence V. Powderly, a machinist and…

In 1786 James White built a fort five miles below the junction of the French Broad and Holston Rivers on the southernmost edge of frontier settlement in present-day East Tennessee. William Blount, governor of the Territory of the United States…

Founded as White's Fort in 1786, Knoxville served as the capital of the Territory South of the River Ohio (or Southwest Territory) and early capital of Tennessee and eventually grew to become the state's third largest city and a major…

Immediately after the Civil War, scores of northern missionaries traveled south to educate the newly freed slaves. These missionary efforts resulted in the establishment of a number of black colleges and universities. One of these schools was Knoxville College, a…

The first newspaper in Tennessee was the Knoxville Gazette, printed initially at Rogersville, Hawkins County, on November 5, 1791. Its editor, printer, and publisher was George Roulstone (1767-1804), who stayed in Rogersville for eleven months before moving the newspaper permanently…

In the case of Knoxville Iron Company v. Harbison (183 U.S. 13) the U.S. Supreme Court upheld an 1899 Tennessee statute requiring cash redemption of store orders and other noncash payments to employees. At issue was a suit brought against…

When the Knoxville Journal ceased operation in 1991, a Knoxville institution died. Although the paper's exact ancestry was sometimes in dispute, the Journal itself liked to claim that it was the descendant of the irascible William G. "Parson" Brownlow's feisty…